China Plans Planetary Defense Test By Slamming Mach 26 Spacecraft Into Asteroid

China Plans Planetary Defense Test By Slamming Mach 26 Spacecraft Into Asteroid A new paper under peer review by the Chinese-language Journal of Deep Space Exploration lays out an ambitious plan to crash a spacecraft at Mach 26, or 20,000 mph, into a near-Earth asteroid to test new planetary defenses. The South China Morning Post reports that a team led by Li Mingtao, chief scientist for planetary defense at the China National Space Administration, is planning a mission even mo...

By Tyler Durden